BERKELEY, CA – Responding to the increasingly data-intensive demands
of the scientific community, the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Sciences
Network (ESnet) is implementing a new architecture of connected Metropolitan
Area Networks (MANs).

Esnet, which is managed by DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
is a high-speed network serving thousands of DOE scientists and collaborators
worldwide. A pioneer in providing reliable high-bandwidth connections,
ESnet enables researchers at national laboratories, universities, and
other institutions to communicate with each other using the collaborative
capabilities needed to address some of the world's most important scientific
challenges. ESnet connects 40 sites nationally and provides high-speed
connectivity for DOE collaborations with the U.S. research and education
community and for collaborations with international science communities
in Europe and Asia.

ESnet's current architecture consists of a national core network connecting
six hubs. The individual sites are connected to the hubs in a single circuit,
in spoke-like fashion. However, for reasons of both reliability and bandwidth,
this architecture is insufficient to meet future demands.

Over the past two years, two workshops sponsored by DOE's Office of Science
examined a set of major DOE science disciplines. They determined that
the process of science related to computing and communication must change
over the next decade in order to make significant progress. Such changes
include:

using massive amounts of distributed data,

coupling multiple simulation components that run at different locations,

and accessing, using, and managing computing resources that are scattered
over much of the globe.

Johnston added, "One benefit of the ring structure of the MANs is
that it will provide the national labs with redundant access to the network,
thus providing substantially increased reliability. Additionally, multiple
optical channels will allow for ESnet to provide new services identified
in the science requirements, in particular guaranteed high-bandwidth channels."

The new MANs, the first of which will be built in the San Francisco Bay
Area, will be based on multiple, 10-gigabit-per-second (10 Gb/s) optical
channels, or "lambdas," that provide high-speed access to the
ESnet core network. In the long term, the ring-structured MANs will be
connected by more than one national core network, with each national core
connecting to the MANs at different physical locations for increased wide-area
reliability, Johnston said.

The San Francisco Bay Area ESnet MAN will be a 10 Gb/s ring and will
connect DOE's Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC), Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), the National Energy Research
Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), the ESnet core network hub in Sunnyvale,
CA (run by Qwest Communications International, Inc.), and the Sunnyvale
site of Level 3 Communications, Inc., which includes a National Lambda
Rail hub with access to DOE's UltraScience Net.

The San Francisco Bay Area MAN has just received approval and funding
from DOE. Engineering and construction should take about six months. This
will be followed by six months of testing and integration into the production
of ESnet. Some sites will require less construction and will be connected
earlier within this time frame.

Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located
in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research
and is managed by the University of California. Visit our website at http://www.lbl.gov.

Additional information

More about ESnet, which provides
network and collaboration services in support of DOE's research missions